Ray: Last issue of The Demon: Hell is Earth ended with Etrigan setting fire to the little girl who had been tagging along on Etrigan and Jason Blood’s adventures, and after a brief interlude where we see some reckless military forces make a bad situation much worse and summon an army of brimstone monsters, we learn why he did that – because the little girl was never a little girl at all. Instead, she was actually a disguised version of Etrigan’s nemesis and brother – Merlin. Yet another magical powerhouse enters the fray, but it’s clear from minute one that this is going to make Jason Blood’s attempts to keep peace more difficult, not less. It doesn’t help that they’re in the middle of a war zone, with demonic forces and military attacks coming from all sides.

This issue finally reveals the power behind the scenes of the attack, and they’ve imprisoned Lucifer (not the Vertigo/Fox one, but what looks like another character) and taken the throne of Hell themselves – it’s Belial, the father of Etrigan. But by the time he’s revealed as the main villain, the issue is so covered in competing demonic forces that the reveal doesn’t have much impact. The plot is sort of lacking – it’s mainly Etrigan yelling at people, occasionally setting them on fire, and then yelling at more people. Where it does shine, though, is in Brad Walker’s designs. He draws a lot of demons in this issue, and some of them are compellingly monstrous. Of all of the recent DC magic books relaunched, this lacks the compelling plot of Mystik U, but its fast-paced story and strong art make it somewhat enjoyable.

Merlin’s back. Image copyright DC Comics

Corrina: This series started out with an intriguing premise, that of a nuclear bomb being used as part of a mystical spell to create a hell landscape. It also had an interesting switch of Etrigan being the one in charge of the transformation in the body he and Jason Blood share.

But this issue, while it’s probably a necessary one to explain how all this happened, doesn’t do much more than that. It seems a bit anti-climactic to have the bomb used as an invasion of this dimension by Hell’s Hordes. The Merlin reveal should have had more impact for me but, instead, I enjoyed the little girl persona much more than the arrogant old wizard.

So, it’s a transition issue. It may well read just fine when it’s part of a story collected into a trade paperback but, as a stand-alone issue, it’s lacking.

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Ray Goldfield is a comics superfan going back almost thirty years. When he's not reading way too many comics a week, he is working on his own writing. The first installment in his young adult fantasy-adventure, "Alex Actonn, Son of Two Seas", is available in Amazon now.

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